Who sells out?

Almost everyone, it seems, as ad exposure helps rockers reach listeners and make more money

October 06, 2002|By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.

Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun" is both a hit single and a jingle used to sell Jamaican vacations. The Counting Crows' "American Girls" simultaneously popped up on commercial radio stations and a soft-drink ad last summer. And the Clash's "London Calling" -- once a song that epitomized the British punk band's brand of "revolution rock" -- has become the soundtrack for a luxury sports-car commercial.

In a previous era, Crow, the Crows and the Clash would have been excoriated for so blatantly "selling out." Once rock bands equated selling their music to an advertiser, no matter how benign, with the crassest form of commercialism, an instant credibility buster if not a career-killer. When a few rock songs started popping up on ads in the '80s, Neil Young was so incensed he wrote "This Note's for You" about it: "Ain't singing for Pepsi, ain't singing for Coke," Young snarled, "I don't sing for nobody, makes me look like a joke."

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published Oct. 10, 2002.

Now Papa Roach is singing for Pepsi, and proud of it. "Time and Time Again," the second single from the California rock band's latest album is being used in an ad to promote the soft-drink manufacturer's latest invention, a berry-cola beverage. "We think this is a great, different way of getting the song out there," says singer Jacoby Shaddix in a statement trumpeting the marketing campaign. "We think these kinds of commercial and creative relationships are the wave of the future," adds Michael Ostin, principal executive of Papa Roach's DreamWorks label.

Those must be chilling words to Young. Fourteen years after "This Note's For You," he still hasn't had a song appear in a TV commercial or accepted a corporate tour sponsor, but it's clear his self-righteous stance no longer speaks for the majority of his peers -- including his old Buffalo Springfield bandmate, Steven Stills, who licensed the rights to the anti-war classic he recorded with Young, "For What It's Worth," to a beer commercial a few years ago. Young's hard-line stance has been replaced by a more ambivalent, less judgmental attitude that sees art and commerce as bedfellows rather than mortal enemies.

Of course, rock and big business have always been partners, if sometimes uneasily; recording contracts with major corporations are the foundation of the industry, beginning with Elvis Presley's $35,000 deal with RCA Records in 1955. But by the late '60s, the lines between the corporations and rock culture began hardening. Bands were signing richer recording deals than ever, but strived to separate themselves from the "straight" world of advertising and television. The punk era hardened those attitudes into us-against-them platitudes. "You were considered a sell-out if you put out a seven-inch single," Moby recalls of his days in the Northeast punk scene. It was an attitude that led Nirvana's Kurt Cobain to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in the early '90s wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed "Corporate magazines still suck," as if to acknowledge his uneasiness with any sort of connection to the world of big business.

Cobain was wrestling with a question that 10 years later is rarely even being asked. For the media world, yesterday's whores have become today's media-savvy visionaries, using the mega-bucks of the advertising industry to get their music in front of listeners who might not otherwise hear it. The major ad agencies are now stocked with rock 'n' rollers, dance-club denizens and hip-hop connoisseurs, a music-savvy business community that hears songs as hip, attention-grabbing currency.

The trend toward music in ads "is less about the bands and more about the people running these ad agencies," says Chris Martiniano, 30, creative director at Zipatoni, a promotional marketing agency. "My generation is more music savvy than the one that came before in this industry."

And the advertisers are marketing to the largest single generation of young Americans since the Baby Boom took over youth culture in the '50s and '60s. Generation Y consists of 71 million Americans born between 1977 and '94, and for them the culture is less about art vs. commerce -- the type of black-and-white dichotomy that sustained the Boomers -- and more about seeing art as just another form of commerce (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). To the "Y" kids, Martiniano and other ad execs say, the world of personal computers, video games, movies, music, media and advertising is a fluid and ever-changing playground of stimuli vying for their attention.

As to why Gen X (the generation between the boomers and the Ys) isn't a music marketing target, Martiniano says they are more cynical and not as easily marketed to. They're also much smaller in size as a group, so it really wasn't a factor in the advertising campaigns.